Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers

Volume 1: Old English

Christine Franzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754656913
• eBook ISBN: 9781351870344
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anglo-Saxon lexicography studies Latin texts and words. The earliest English lexicographers are largely unidentifiable students, teachers, scholars and missionaries. Materials brought from abroad by early teachers were augmented by their teachings and passed on by their students. Lexicographical material deriving from the early Canterbury school remains traceable in glossaries throughout this period, but new material was constantly added. Aldhelm and Ælfric Bata, among others, wrote popular, much studied hermeneutic texts using rare, exotic words, often derived from glossaries, which then contributed to other glossaries. Ælfric of Eynsham is a rare identifiable early English lexicographer, unusual in his lack of interest in hermeneutic vocabulary. The focus is largely on context and the process of creation and intended use of glosses and glossaries. Several articles examine intellectual centres where scholars and texts came together, for example, Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury; Aldhelm in Malmesbury; Dunstan at Christ Church, Canterbury; Æthelwold in Winchester; King Æthelstan's court; Abingdon; Glastonbury; and Worcester.

Section 1
Introduction and
Latin and Greek Sources

1
Old English Glossaries: Creating a Vernacular

Antonette diPaolo Healey

The response of a reader in this post-modern age when confronting for the first time an Old English glossary is that of surprise. The strangeness and the novelty of what we survey arise from the disjunction between our expectations of what a glossary should be, and what, in fact, exists for this genre in the earliest period of English, between the seventh and the twelfth centuries. A glossary, as we all know, is ‘a partial dictionary’ (OED2 s.v. glossary¹, main sense). We assume, almost without question, that it is an alphabetical word list pertaining to a particular subject matter (such as a glossary of medical terms) or to a specific piece of writing (such as a glossary to the books of the Bible). We also assume that its intent is illumination: to guide the reader from an unknown or opaque term (in either a foreign language or one’s own) to a term which is familiar or, at least, comprehensible. As we explore the possibilities of creating Early Dictionary Databases, I wish to test our assumptions about dictionaries against the evidence of the Old English glossaries.

Size of the Glossary Corpus of Old English

The Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form consists of three million running words of Old English to which are attached another two million running words of Latin. Old English glossaries constitute only 1% of this Electronic Corpus, 0.3 Mb in a 30 Mb corpus. For purposes of classification, the editors of the Dictionary have identified 143 texts out of a corpus of 3022 as glossaries.² The Old English items within each glossary range in number from a single and forlorn Old English gloss in a thicket of Old High German glosses to the more than 2000 Old English glosses in the Corpus Glossary (Wynn 1961–2), the largest glossary in our citation base, containing more than 8000 items, 75% of which are Latin-Latin glosses, and the 4096 items in the Antwerp Glossary (Kindschi 1955), the majority of which are Latin-Old English. These glossaries represent an interesting subset of our corpus, and they are significant in the history of the language: they are the first English attempts at compiling bilingual dictionaries, from Latin to Old English. By the end of the transitional period between Old and Middle English, when the effects of the Norman Conquest are fully reflected in the spellings and vocabulary of English manuscripts, scribes have become so adept at constructing glossaries that at least one trilingual glossary is produced. Written around 1200,³ the trilingual glossary of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English in MS Bodley 730 is in no way a distinguished piece of work — one might, in fact, call it retrograde in its treatment of English.⁴ Yet it reflects a continuing interest in the meanings of words and an expansion of focus from one source language, medieval Latin, to two target languages, Anglo-Norman and English. It is not until the work of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester in the thirteenth century that we find our first monolingual lexicographer of English, who attempted to define and interpret for Middle English readers the strange vocabulary and archaic spellings of Old English. What is of even more interest for the history of lexicography is the important discovery by Christine Franzen in 1991 that the Tremulous Hand of Worcester produced a glossary in the thirteenth century, which is the earliest known glossary arranged in alphabetical sequence not by Latin, but by English, word (Franzen: 119–24).⁵

Types of Old English Glossaries

Although the Middle Ages would not itself have classified glossaries as “Research Tools”, they were intended as aids to learning. The first question then to be asked of these dictionaries is how is the information accessible. To those of us raised in the West on the Roman alphabet with its well-established sequence of letters, the fact of absolute alphabetization is an everyday and unexamined convention. Therefore, we are mildly surprised to find, when examining these early glossaries for the first time, that what is now the universally-accepted convention for dealing with long lists of words was not used. Lloyd W. Daly has suggested in his analysis of alphabetization in the classical and medieval periods, that absolute alphabetization, a highly-refined system for filing a large number of words, could only take place if there were the notion of “slips” for ordering the material (Daly 1967: 86).⁶ The use of slips or cards seems only to have come about once paper was abundantly and cheaply available. Daly was not able to find any positive evidence from the material culture for the use of slips until after the early Middle Ages, nor is there evidence from linguistic records of a proper word for “slip” in this sense in either Greek or Latin (ibid.: 86–7). Following Daly’s lead, I searched our corpus for the Latin terms scheda ‘strip of papyrus bark’, schedula ‘small leaf of paper’, and their variant spellings, to discover their Old English equivalents. I found only five words: four of them, carte, tēag, gewrit, and ymele, suggest either a piece of paper, or a document, or what is written; one, scrēad, from its context as a gloss to Isidore 6.14.8, has the sense ‘(emended) part (of a text)’. There seems not to be any word in Old English which conveys the notion of “slip”. According to the OED, the noun schedule in the sense of ‘[a] slip or scroll of parchment or paper containing writing […] a short note’ is not attested in English until 1397 (OED2 s.v. schedule, sense 1). This is confirmed by the MED in its entries for cedūle and scedūle. The noun slip in the sense of ‘[a] piece of paper or parchment, esp. one which is narrow in proportion to its length’ is not attested in English until 1687 (OED2 s.v. slip sb.², sense l0.a).

Class Glossaries

In the Old English period, there are two basic principles for ordering lists of words. The first is logical order where information is grouped according to various subjects, such as the names of birds, animals, trees, implements, etc. These are known as class glossaries, and although we can often find an individual category without great effort, it is sometimes difficult to search for individual items within a category, especially if it is large. Ælfric’s Glossary is a well-known representative of this type. Ælfric issued his Glossary as a supplement to his Latin Grammar; however, it is not, as we would normally expect, a glossary to the Grammar, but rather an independently-compiled vocabulary list to aid the study of Latin (Butler 1981: 19). It is derived from Isidore’s Etymologies, and Ælfric follows Isidore in ordering his material according to subject, such as kinds of birds, kinds of fish, names of plants, etc. Here the similarity between Ælfric and his source ends: while Isidore is encyclopedic, drawing upon arcane and fantastical material, Ælfric, in contrast, takes great care in winnowing his material to preserve only that vocabulary which is most useful for the beginning student of Latin (ibid.: 20). The approximately 1300 Latin words and their Old English translations are, for the most part, basic and familiar terms. The following grouping is typical: sanguis blod ‘blood’; caro flæsc ‘flesh, body’; cutis hyd ‘hide’; pellis fell ‘skin’; scapula sculdra ‘shoulder’; dorsum hrycg ‘back’; uenter wamb ‘stoma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Section 1 Introduction and Latin and Greek Sources
• Section 2 Early Old English Glossaries
• Section 3 Glossed Texts and Glosses as Texts
• Section 4 Late Old English Glossaries
• Index